I read the book a while ago, just saw the movie (and loved it!). Can someone remind how long in Earth time it takes Grace to make it to Tau Ceti? I know it’s around 11 light years from there, so his messages back take that long.
At the end of the movie, they show Stratt watching his messages back and (I think) putting the predators to work? Did that happen in the book? I would have thought the time it took for him to get there and get the predators back would take too long for her to benefit from it.
The other thing about an interstellar war is that the Eridians would easily win. They can quickly create all the astrophage they want because their oceans are above the breeding temperature, no paving the Sahara in glass panels necessary. Their planet and civilization aren’t coming out of a huge crisis. With xenonite they were able send a ship with a crew of 23 to Tau Ceti, no coma technology with a 67% failure rate needed. Now that they know about relativity & radiation they have every advantage. Hell, a ship from Earth likely couldn’t even find any targets through their thick atmosphere, whereas an Erid attack ship could just aim for the bright spots on the night side of Earth. So unless you buy into the “humans are better at warfare than every other species” trope, we’d quickly find ourselves exterminated.
No. In the book we never see anything on Earth except Grace’s flashbacks. Instead, when Grace is on Eridani (for 10+ years at that point IIRC) Rocky tells him their astronomers have confirmed that Sol has returned to full luminance, so he knows the beetles were successful.
Thanks! I feel like after trying hard to make the physics mostly work in a universe with astrophages, that was a big slip-up at the end. I guess they felt the audience needed some closure.
Sandra Hüller is 48. Assuming Stratt is the same age, and ISTR in the book they were planning 26 years from launch to return, that would make her 74 when the Beetles Get Back.
It’s actually 11.9 LY. But astrophage lets you do it. As Grace said in the book “Astrophage would be the greatest thing ever if it wasn’t going to kill all of us in a few years.”
No matter how fast the astrophage lets you accelerate, humans can only handle so much g-force. Anyway, I don’t want to further hijack this thread, so physics answers over there, please.
Yeah, it was 1.5g in the book. I’m 99% certain Andrew Weir did that so he could show Grace, even not knowing his own name, coming up with 2 experiments in short order (time a falling object, measure the period of a pendulum) to measure the force of gravity, and then realize he had to be on an accelerating space ship (or an improbably large centrifuge)
Well, 1 in 3 humans at least.
Seriously, the 1.5 g vs 1g shaved a year off the ship-experienced travel time, so they were balancing how long they were comatose vs the acceleration they could survive. But I stand by my statement above about why Weir really picked something other than 1g.
Is there any outside-the-novel material in which Weir explains how Eridani astronomy is supposed to work for beings that don’t have vision? I ask that in the assumption that it’s not broached in the book.
I still wonder how the Eridani ever learned light existed. Just having trouble wrapping my head around it. Modern Earth-based astronomy may not be based much on direct visual observation, but it most certainly started that way. Would Eridani ever cast gobsmacked “gazes” at the heavens?
I can almost, just barely on the edge of my imagination, envision the Eridani eventually becoming hip to light/electromagnetic radiation via ability to sense heat. But I can’t connect the dots into a coherent story of “Eridani scientific discovery through the ages”.
My guess is that they would have first arrived at the notion through conservation of energy, and noting that a hot object loses energy to its surroundings (which, for a hot enough object, doesn’t just involve infrared). But they could also have gotten there starting from radio waves, or from Maxwell’s equations, or a variety of other paths. I’d say probably not Maxwell’s equations, because it’s a short step from there to special relativity, which we know they didn’t have, but it’s hard to say.